a log of links, thoughts, notes and scribbles
Month: December 2003
Oh boy it’s Christmas and what a wonderful day it’s been.
Went over to my sister and brother-in-laws for Christmas lunch with the family.
My bro-in-law did the Turkey and followed Delia to a tee – fabulous lunch with a very nice blueberry sauce to go with the potatoes.
Lots of pressies under the tree and excited little ones running around.
A great day
I’ve just been Christmas shopping in Kingston and it’s bedlam out there.
Masses and masses of people shopping like there’s no tomorrow.
Queues 10 deep at the tills and the staff struggling to take the cash off punters quick enough.
It’s a frenzy of consumption and, quite frankly, I don’t like it.
I hate shopping at the best of times. But quadruple the numbers and load the shelves with cheap seasonal crap and it turns me right off.
The streets are jammed with cars, the busses packed with people and the pavements overflowing with pedestrians weighed down with their purchases.
The amazing thing was that no one really seemed to be enjoying it.
It’s a freezing cold day.
Most people seemed to be either arguing with each other over what to buy, or frantically running round desperate to find things to buy.
Michael Andrews and Gary Jules have taken the top slot with their moving rendition of Tears for Fears classic Mad World.
They managed to sell 236,000 copies to become this year’s Christmas number one.
It’s an interesting song which has some haunting resonance for our time. Looking around the world this Christmas it does seem to be a bit of a mad place.
Am glad that they got the number one rather than some shite boy band or some pop idol has been.
Also, it only takes 236,000 copies to get to number one. The singles market is dead !
Anyway, here are the lyrics:
Tears For Fears – Mad World
All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places ? worn out faces
Bright and early for their daily races
Going nowhere ? going nowhere
Their tears are filling up their glasses
No expression ? no expression
Hide my head I want to drown my sorrow
No tomorrow ? no tomorrow
And I find it kinda funny, I find it kinda sad
The dreams in which I?m dying are the best I?ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take
When people run in circles it?s a very very
mad world mad world
Children waiting for the day they feel good
Happy birthday ? happy birthday
Made to feel the way that every child should
Sit and listen ? sit and listen
Went to school and I was very nervous
No one knew me ? no one knew me
Hello teacher tell me what?s my lesson
Look right through me ? look right through me
And I find it kinda funny, I find it kinda sad
The dreams in which I?m dying are the best I?ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take
When people run in circles it?s a very very
Mad world . . . world
Enlarge your world
Mad world
Had a wonderful family wedding this weekend.
The third this year !
My cousin got married in a cathedral, which was fantastic.
The choir and the music were stunning and all the church reglia was on show.
A great service and a very enjoyable reception and evening party.
Lots of fun and lots of interesting people there.
Everyone made merry and most drank too much, including me !
Eventually got to bed in the small hours and woke up this morning with a mare of a hangover.
Christmas has started and I now have 2 weeks off work….how good is that !
They’ve got him. Saddam has been captured alive in Iraq. He’s been on the run for 8 months and now the Americans have finally caught up with him. It’s been all over the news with footage of Saddam with a long messy beard. The Americans got a tip off and they found him hiding in an underground hole with $750,000 in cash and a few guns. The Americans are over the moon. I’ve heard one commentator even say that this will deliver Bush’s second term !
There now seems to be 2 questions: What will they do with him and will his capture put an end to the attacks against the coalition ?
They will probably interrogate him about WMD and and the dealings of his regime. Interesting that they took him alive. Might have been easier to put a bullet in him and just say he was caught in a fire fight like his sons. No messy trial to deal with. Having said that, the Americans are big fans of the death penalty. Would they wheel out the gallows for Saddam ? They may shove him in Guantanamo Bay and wait. No doubt there will be a trial, but who will try him, in what jurisdiction and on what charges. There are so many to choose from, genocide/weapons of mass destruction/human rights abuses etc etc.
Will Saddam’s capture end the insurgency against the coalition ? Probably not. Saddam was found in a hole in the ground on a small farm outside Tikrit. Hardly a place to plan and coordinate a nationwide guerilla war. Saddam’s personal control over the insurgency was probably negligable. His symbolic presence was a far more important weapon. I think we underestimate how much the Iraqi people genuinely feared Saddam.
The attacks will go on and may get worse. There have been so many car bombs and suicide attacks recently. These won’t simply stop now Saddam has been captured.
I’ve just been sent some great photos on email which I though I’d share:
Mountain Cloud
Cyclone Graham
Lightning Strike
Shark and Surfer
Sun Catcher
Enjoy……
I was on the tube the other day minding my own business when a group of school kids got on. One boy of about 10 turned to another and said without a hint of irony, “so, what if God isn’t Mexican…”. The other boy immediately replied, “he is Mexican”. They sat down and their conversation turned to other things.
Most bizarre – that really made me laugh…..what the hell were they on about. It was probably a wind up…
Just watched the classic episode of The Office where David Brent does the dance.
Absolutely hysterical !
The Office is such a good series, genuinely funny and terribly cringe-making.
Spent half an hour screaming with laughter and hiding behind my hands with horror at their antics.
Brent is such a twat and the rest are geeks and losers. But, put them all together and you’ve got a winning recipe for laughs.
Excellent, I want more…..
Can’t wait for the one-off at Christmas.
So, Al Gore has thrown his weight behind Howard Dean. The Democrat that lost to George Bush in 2000 has decided to back the Dean for America campaign. Why ?
At the outset it might seem obvious. Dean is the current Democratic front runner who’s had remarkable success in building a grass-roots political campaign. He’s a liberal, pro-choice, anti-war candidate from the left of the Democratic Party. American Liberals will support him. Gore will add weight, experience and, crucially, votes to the Dean camp. Gore seems to believe that Howard Dean is the best bet for the Democrats to win back the White House.
But, and here’s the big but. At present, Dean is too liberal to seriously take on Bush in a head to head race for the Presidency. Dean has to appeal to a much wider political constituency to get the votes and pick up the crucial states that deliver the White House.
Carl Rove, the Machieavellian chief political strategist of the Bush camp, remarked that Howard Dean is the Democrat they want to fight. The right want another McGovern and Dean is their man ! They know they can beat him up on abortion, national security and probably the economy. Dean may be the man now for Gore and the Democrats, but will he be right when the real race is on…….
I campaigned for Gore on the internet and was gutted when Bush snatched the presidency in the farce that was the Florida recounts. It’s important that Bush doesn’t get a second term. It’s important to me and I don’t even live in America. The Democrats have to put the right team together to seriously take on the Republicans. A campaigning team that can land blows on the Bush camp while appealing to as wide as possible a constituency. At the moment, I don’t think Dean is the best candidate for that….
Saw Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine last night. My God, Americans and their firearms ! What a weird and wacky world of gun nuts he turned up. Loved the scene in the bank where you get a free gun or something for opening an account or signing up for a loan…..jeez !
He perfectly juxtaposed American and Canadian gun cultures. Interview with a rather stunned policeman from Windsor, Ontario who is struggling to remember when the last shooting was. All he could confirm was that it was within his lifetime ! The stats on shooting were pretty telling too – 68 a year in the UK and over 11,000 in the US. Whoa !
So yeah... 